Following “a period of disappointing financial performance”
Frontier Developments have announced that they’ll be undertaking an “organisationl review” of the company after “disappointing financial performance and more challenging industry conditions”. The news came yesterday in anoteto investors, signalling yet another wave of industry layoffs.
It’s not yet clear how many employees will be affected at Frontier, but the studio say that their goal of reducing annual operating costs by up to 20% will be “achieved through a recruitment freeze, spending cuts and, unfortunately, redundancies, subject to consultation”.
All this comes ahead of the release of Frontier’s upcoming Warhammer RTSAge Of Sigmar: Realms Of Ruin, which releases on November 17th next month. They seem optimistic(-ish) about it in their note to investors, and add that their existing portfolio “continues to perform in line with expectations”.
Still, with this kind of review hanging over it, you can’t help but feel like there’s just a smidge of extra pressure on it to be successful, especially given it’s their only major new release that currently seems to be in the pipeline. I’m no business analyst, but given how much games cost to make these days (see Paradox’s recentwriting off of $22mjust to cover the disappointing performance ofThe Lamplighters League), I worry what a similarly-sized flop would mean for Frontier’s future.
It’s been a pretty grim couple of weeks (months? Entire year?) for the video games industry between the recently announced layoffs atCreative Assembly,Team17,Epic Games, and the Epic-ownedBandcamp- and that’s to say nothing of all the other major layoffs and closures announced at other studios from earlier in the year. CD Projekt staff recentlyformed a unionin the wake of some of these larger layoffs, and have encouraged devs across the industry to do the same.
